Life Goes On
- charlsiedoan
- 8 hours ago
- 6 min read
I’ve never lived through war. Bombs have never fallen in my neighborhood, blood was never smeared on the streets where I walked, artillery was never the soundtrack to my life.
Not so for everyone who lived in Sarajevo from 1992 until late 1995. The city was under siege for those three-plus years, encircled by the paramilitary forces of Republika Srpska and the remnants of the Yugoslav People’s Army. In the city, remnants of the war don’t jump out at you, but they’re there if you look for them. There are bullet holes in the facades of buildings, broken windows, pockmarks in the pavement, caused by Serbian shelling.
A brief background of the war might be helpful. Bosnia-Herzegovina used to be part of Yugoslavia, a multi-ethnic federation of socialist republics that included Serbia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, Macedonia, Slovenia, and Montenegro. Communist Yugoslavia was formed in the aftermath of World War II, led by Josip Broz Tito, but Tito split ideologically from the Soviet Union soon after and Yugoslavia became kind of CommunistLiteTM. Tito died in 1980, and Yugoslavia began to fall apart.
Bosnia sat right in the middle of Yugoslavia, and was more diverse than any other Yugoslav republic. While Serbs, Croats, and Bosnians (Bosniaks) spoke the same language and shared a common ancestry, they were divided by religion—some ancestors had converted to Catholicism, some to Eastern Orthodoxy, and some to Islam. As a result, Bosnia was home to Muslim Bosniaks, Catholic Croats, and Orthodox Serbs, and before the 1990s, these groups seemed to live in relative harmony.
But as republics started to splinter off and declare independence, things became complicated. Serbia wanted Bosnian lands where ethnic Serbs lived to become part of Serbia, and Croatia thought the same thing. When Bosnia declared independence in 1992 after a nationwide referendum, the fire was lit.
The Siege of Sarajevo began almost instantly, and lasted the entire duration of the war. As my flight descended towards Sarajevo, it was easy to see why the siege was so unbreakable. The city is in a valley, ringed on all sides by mountains. The mountains were the perfect site for the 1984 Winter Olympics, but they were also the perfect vantage point for snipers and artillery.
Airlifts dropped humanitarian aid into the city or it was smuggled through the tunnel under the U.N.-controlled airport, the only land route out of Sarajevo. I walked through a reconstructed portion of the tunnel, and I could just barely stand up straight, so I can’t imagine how the soldiers felt, lugging or pushing pounds of food, medicine, and sometimes other wounded soldiers. The tunnel often flooded too. There’s video recordings of all of this—it was only the 90s, remember—and you can see men sloshing through knee-deep brown water, an old lady handing them water as they exited the tunnel.
The food in humanitarian aid packages was often very old—sometimes fifty years old—and not always edible. Cigarettes and coffee were prized above all else, and when coffee ran out, people roasted lentils, ground them up, and brewed them instead. The mayor of Sarajevo made the equivalent of $2 a day.
NATO had destroyed the Yugoslav Army’s Air Force early in the war, so the main threats facing the people of Sarajevo were snipers and shells. Snipers could, theoretically, be avoided. People learned where to walk, sprinting when they had to cross open streets, bedsheets were strung up to keep people from view, and strategically posted signs around the city warned “danger: sniper.”
Although investigations are still ongoing, everybody in Sarajevo believes that Serb forces invited wealthy foreigners to the siege line where, for a large amount of money, they could take a turn at the rifle and shoot people in Sarajevo. This situation has the macabre name “Sarajevo Safari.”
Shells couldn’t be avoided; you just needed to get lucky and stay lucky. Serb forces quickly began targeting civilian sites: bakeries where people lined up to buy bread, humanitarian aid distribution sites, hospitals. You don’t need to have taken international law or have worked for the Red Cross to know that this is illegal, but just in case there is any doubt, I can tell you: it’s illegal. Sites where shells killed three or more people have been turned into “Sarajevo roses;” the holes filled with red concrete.
There are several museums in Sarajevo about the war, but I only went to one, on my first day in the city. Walking around that museum was even worse knowing that multiple wars are going on this very minute. I refreshed the New York Times website while in the museum to see news of renewed American and Israeli airstrikes on Tehran’s Mehrabad Airport. All that pain and destruction that the museum was meant to remind us of is being repeated as I write this, and will be repeated, over and over and over again.
How can we, humanity, keep making these same mistakes over and over again? Choices made by leaders who will not experience the consequences in their own lives. Their children won’t be shot in the street or crushed when their school building collapses on top of them. It is almost too much to bear. I fear that I see precursors to this kind of ethnic violence in the United States, the kind of hate that eventually erupts from beneath the skin and bubbles into a hot war: bullets fired, houses leveled, families destroyed.
But the museum, and this essay, is not about those leaders. It’s about the people who dearly with the consequences. The museum is meant to show you that life goes on, the weddings go on, children keep playing, art is built out of the rubble, musicians keep performing. It’s the story we hear about war—that it brings out the worst in humanity, but also the best. Beauty and joy continue, flowers continue to grow, cats still purr, babies still laugh.
We all know that war tends to be romanticized by people who have never experienced it. The heroism of the soldiers, the evil of the enemy, the noble suffering of civilians. We who have never experienced war imagine that it heightens our senses, makes us grateful for every waking moment, washes away all of our smaller, pettier problems, and gives us a wiser perspective on life.
But there’s a perhaps slightly darker, but even more humanizing side to the story we tell about people during war. Everything goes on. Ordinary, good people don’t stop making the kinds of mistakes that make us human.
An interview in the museum made me realize this. A woman said the siege was difficult, not only because of the war, but because her parents had gotten divorced. And I realized—war does not turn us into angels. People don’t stop being complicated, in all of the frustrating ways that make us human. Living in dark times does not mean we cannot engage with the full spectrum of emotions that make us human, even the ones that seem petty. People in Sarajevo surely still had the same problems they had before: people argued with each other, couples broke up, children struggled in school, people with drinking problems drank too much (if not more), teenagers fought with their parents.
The siege ended in late 1995 when NATO bombed the Serbs’ positions. A peace deal and post-war plan was agreed upon in Dayton, Ohio, the plan that resulted in Bosnia essentially having two governments and three constituent peoples.
Today, the air in the center of the city is thick with cigarette smoke and smoke from the barbecues, pooling in the valley between the mountains. The leather jacket I wear in an attempt to look as cool as Bosnian girls smells like the city. Sarajevo does have a problem with air pollution; a guide told me that, in the winter, it’s always a competition with Lahore, Pakistan to be the most polluted city.
I imagine every people deals with the aftermath of such pain in their own way. Aggressive turn to dominance. Silence and erasure. Somber mourning and reverence. A clinging to tradition, religious or otherwise. Often I think these coping mechanisms overlap. Bosnia took the war as a sign not to take life too seriously, a reason not to delay pleasure or joy. A reason to puff on cigarettes and drink coffee with friends.
It brings me some hope, being in Sarajevo, hope that peace is possible even when imperfect, hope that even if individuals die, we survive, and hope that life will always go on.
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